


cats of a gold coat (summer and winter)

by Leaf-Groot (Tavina)



Series: the world will hear us roar [2]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Dreaming of Sunshine - Silver Queen
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Basically a series of outtakes, Gen, Mentions of War, Shikako as Jocelyn has adapted to Westeros, So Divergent, The Ruthless Siblings Lannister, Tywin is still (probably) unhinged, multiple POVs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-17
Updated: 2020-01-17
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:20:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,890
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22289293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tavina/pseuds/Leaf-Groot
Summary: The Lannister siblings, all six of them, in all their seasons, the quiet moments.Or, the empty spaces there were between the Lannister Twins returning from King’s Landing and  Tywin’s Revolt.
Relationships: Tywin Lannister & Nara Shikako
Series: the world will hear us roar [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1604410
Comments: 21
Kudos: 508
Collections: Dreaming of Sunshine Exchange 2019 B, Heliocentrism — a Dreaming of Sunshine recursive collection





	cats of a gold coat (summer and winter)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kitsunesongs](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kitsunesongs/gifts).



> So, this isn't the sequel I was thinking of writing, but more of a series of cut scenes/missing scenes from the time Jocelyn and Tywin return from King's Landing to basically the decision to start a rebellion. 
> 
> Full sequel maybe later? (I do have plans)

“You talk in your sleep, Joss.” Tywin sits at her bedside, his hands clasped together so tight that she is half certain he will leave crescent bruises on the backs of his hands in the shape of his nails.

There is tension in his shoulders, a hard bunched muscle in his upper arm. He sits hunched in his great chair, an ankle on one knee.

“What did I say?” She sits up slowly, a blistering headache gathering in her temples, behind her eyes. Tywin unclasps his hands and slides a rail hard arm under her shoulders, hastily rearranges pillows until he is content to let her lie back among them. This close, she can imagine the faint sound of his teeth grinding.

Though he treated her with a tenderness born of extremely possessive love, the same could rarely be said of everything else in his path.

There was some sort of incident on their way back from King’s Landing. The winter had been cold, the roads frozen hard but covered with snow.

They say the northern winter had started earlier, but here in the south it had taken a year or more to reach the depth of snow that plagued their neighbors.

The winter had been cold, and they had traveled slow.

She’d caught a chill.

This she remembers.

She also remembers her childhood bedroom in the Rock, the posters of her bed carved with little lionheads and claws for feet. The heavy woolen tapestry of a snarling lioness on a backdrop of red tells her that they are in Lannister domains once more.

He sits back down, carefully rearranges his posture.

The frown carving its way deep into his face has not lessened, not the least bit.

“Who,” he says with great and definite slowness, “is Shikamaru?”

Her heart jumps to her throat. She hasn’t heard that name outside of her own mind in years. To hear it now, eight and ten years after she has lost a whole world for a second time, especially from the mouth of her callous twin?

Positively frigid.

Yet one more thing Tywin would never understand.

“I don’t know who that is.” It’s a lie, a lie, a _lie._ She knows so well, knows too well, knows even as his face blurred, even as how his voice sounded is lost.

“You’re lying.” Tywin turns away, his face turning red in the weak lantern light. “You’re _lying,_ Joss. Don’t lie to me.”

“What makes you think I’m lying?”

It might be a lie, but in some twisted, perverse way, it’s also the truth: Jocelyn Lannister knew no one named Shikamaru.

And she is Jocelyn Lannister now.

“Did you have some other twin brother?” There’s definitely a hint of a barb to his tone now. It’s gone deep beneath his skin now. It’s more personal to him than his innocuous first question. “When you were sick it was all you would call me. I think I’m entitled to meet this other golden haired brother of yours, no?”

It’s all she can do to _not flinch._ So it’s come to this point then.

“You’re going to think I’m mad.”

He snorts, tension suddenly bleeding out of him. “I’d never think that of you, Joss.”

“I’m about to tell you that I was someone else once.” Her headache starts to recede.

“And you had another twin brother whose name was Shikamaru, and sometimes you still think of him when you think no one else is looking.” He turns his head to one side, golden curls cascading over his cheek. “Is that sort of lie worth it to you, Joss?”

“It’s not a lie, Ty.” Something in her burns white hot. They might call Tywin the Angry Lion, at least, when they don’t think he’s listening, but she’s capable of anger too, capable of fury and rage, and snarling words.

He turns back to her. “We grew up together.”

“You can choose to believe what you want.” She struggles into a proper sitting position and struggles some more to stand. “You can’t just move the tilting dummy when you don’t want to believe something, Tywin.”

A blood vessel throbs at his temple.

He turns away.

* * *

“Joss, will you come to Lannisport with me?” In less than a fortnight’s time, he rides to battle under Uncle Jason’s banner — the banners of House Lannister. It will be the last time he rides to Lannisport with Jocelyn.

For some time.

For some time, if not for all time.

Something must be done, but not inside the Rock.

There are too many of his lord father’s eyes and ears still, and he doubts that anyone would be pleased to learn what he was planning.

“I’ll come with you.” She rises from the corner where she’d been studying a map of the Stepstones. “Are we going to buy lemons? I heard there was a good market for them a few days ago from Maester Pycelle.”

“You did always like lemons.” She made faces when eating them, but she did like lemon tarts.

She sets her hand on his arm rather gaily, and chatters about this and that, what she’d heard, the mundane knowledge of the household, of Lannisport, of their cousins, of this or that one of their siblings has done.

He hums, listens with half an ear.

She knows him well, like the other side of a golden dragon. She does not mention what they both wish to speak about.

He offers her a hand up into her carriage, and today, chooses to take the reins himself, banishing the stable boy who had originally been sent to take them into Lannisport with vague directions to return his horse to the stables.

“Do you remember we used to walk to Lannisport?” Jocelyn asks from behind him. “How our lady mother used to reprimand us for it? Do you remember that, Ty?”

“I do,” he says. “That didn’t stop you from coming with me.”

“Who else would guard your back from being stabbed?” She’s freer with her words when it’s just the two of them, when it is just the two of them alone in the world.

They’d used to disguise themselves as servants and sneak out of Casterly Rock, two golden lions dressed in the kitchen help’s cast offs.

“Who indeed,” he murmurs. “Do you remember what happened at the breakfast table this morning?”

It isn’t hard to remember the woman wearing their dead lady mother’s jewels.

That golden lion broach set with a ruby in the mouth had been meant for _Joss._

The corner of his mouth turns down, and he slaps the reins a bit harder against the flank of the horse than he’d intended.

“It is not easy to forget.” Jocelyn sighs from behind him,and now that they are far enough away from the Rock that such an egregious social breach would not be noted, pushes aside the hanging of the carriage and squeezes herself and her wide skirts onto the front seat beside him.

“I’ll be gone for some time.” He stares straight ahead, up ahead, Lannisport looms in the seaward fog. This road is only travelled by those who had business between the Rock and Lannisport, but other roads are more crowded, busier.

He pulls on the reins, slows them to a near stop. “I almost wish to take you with me.” Even if the battlefield is no place for a lady, no place for a woman, no place for anyone like Joss, he could probably trust her to keep her head. Unlike Kevan or Tygett.

He’d have to watch out for them, instead of trusting them to watch his back.

“We both know that would never work.” She keeps the small dagger he had made for her while they were in King’s Landing close. “I don’t think I shall regret not going.” She leans her head against his shoulder, and they stare out into the rolling fog. “But I will miss you.”

They hadn’t been parted ever. In eight and ten years, they had not been parted for much longer than half a day.

But now he will ride with the westerlands banners, and she will not.

“I’ll trust you to manage things at home.”

And there would be _reason_ to manage things at home.

Considering that the woman their lord father had taken to bed was Gerion’s wetnurse.

She ought to be banished, ought to be paraded stripped in the streets so all could see that she was naught more than a whore, but in the some five years he and Jocelyn had been gone, the woman had truly sunk her claws into every aspect of life in the Rock.

He hadn’t the time to manage it, but Jocelyn will.

And he trusts that she will put their house in order.

* * *

Gerion climbs the steps up to his eldest sister’s tower room. Lady Jocelyn.

She’d been in King’s Landing until now, Genna had said. He doesn’t quite remember a time when she hasn’t been away, but she’d been ill for some time after she’d returned, and then for another moon or so adults had spoken of wars and of usurpers and Blackfyres and mercenaries when they thought he could not hear.

But now that keep was quiet, he could go to see Lady Jocelyn. The servants all whispered that she was mad, strange stories of a child who knew too much and this time of how she’d called out in a strange language whenever Lord Tywin had attended to her.

If she is truly mad, he would like to see.

“Gerion?” When he pushes open the door, she turns to him with a slight smile. “Is that you?”

She does not _look_ mad.

She looks very pretty.

“Are you Lady Jocelyn?” The morning sunlight shines on her hair like burnished gold, gold on gold on the gold of her cloth of gold gown. If it were not that her eyes were a pale green like his own she might be entirely gold.

“Joss is fine.” She opens her arms to him, and it takes a moment to realize that she means to offer him a hug. “You were too young to write to when we left for King’s Landing,” she murmurs in his hair when he does step forward into her embrace.

It feels like coming home.

It feels like coming home in a way that other arms never have.

* * *

Kevan rides to battle behind his elder brother, wishing all the while that he could somehow turn around and go home. For all that there are only two years between them, there were only five minutes between his elder brother and his elder sister.

And unfathomably close despite being nothing alike at all.

He would much rather have taken the placid shadowed beauty of Lady Jocelyn Lannister and stay in Casterly Rock instead of riding into a warzone right behind the seething tower of rage that is Lord Tywin Lannister.

Which, he really should not have thought. In the long scheme of things, he would learn.

But as of yet, he does not know.

Five years apart has made the back of the man of eight and ten before him a stranger.

The spring mud makes the Stepstones slippery, makes the horses unbalanced, makes life wet and hard and miserable.

And ever present is the threat of war.

Uncle Jason falls at Bloodstone, thrown from his horse and slain, more in accident than in pitched battle.

Kevan watches it happen, too far too help, too close to ignore, almost helpless in the fact of it all.

And afterwards, that night, when the mood around their campfire is desolate and breathtaking in its gloom, it is Tywin who takes charge, barking orders, forcing his will upon the landscape of the soldiers, forcing them to rally their morale.

By the time Tywin makes his way into their tent, Tyg had fallen asleep, his head pillowed against Kevan’s knee.

“What do we do now?” he asks when Tywin throws the tent flap closed against the chill and dismal drizzle.

“Have the plans changed?” his elder brother asks, with a voice as cold and desolate as the winter’s wind, a sharp biting chill to freeze men’s bones. “I wasn’t aware that you planned on never returning to the Rock.”

“Is that all this means to you?” What sort of man was his elder brother? What sort of man would lead them when Lord Tytos Lannister went to the Stranger’s keep?

“I didn’t figure you as someone who cared to bother with the Stepstones, Kevan.” Tywin throws his cloak about a chair, shakes out his golden curls and sits at the small camp table.

The scritch scritch of quill against parchment began, with no hint of how much heed Tywin paid much of anything else.

Every night since the fighting had began, it was the same.

At night, when there was time, there would be Tywin at his camp table, writing and reading whatever letters had managed to find them in the stinking mess of war.

But Kevan is sure that it’s not to their lord father that Tywin wrote.

* * *

It had been barely days since returning home from the war, but Lord Tytos Lannister’s heart had given out whilst climbing the stairs to see his mistress, or at least, that was how things appeared.

Now he lay in state in the sept, while his eldest son paced the front hall, the rest of his children lined up in accordance with their age.

Tygett wishes, very briefly, to be of more _use._

He was one and ten now, had killed four men in the War of the Ninepenny Kings, but while Tywin had knighted Prince Aerys, and had knighted Kevan, he’d been too young.

Too young to be knighted despite fighting valiantly.

Too young to be knighted despite protecting what was his to protect. And he’d been sent home long before the war was finished, in Tywin’s words “to aid Joss with what might need to be done at home.”

Now their lord father was dead, and his eldest brother was the Lord of the Westerlands. There was no place in this keep for a third son anymore, not even one who had been willing to bargain it all, that much was clear from the way the new Lord of Lannister paced.

But first, there were words he must say. “The woman who has locked herself in the north tower must go.”

Their father’s mistress had been forced to give back the broach, the pins, the heavy golden necklaces, the jewels and fine clothing little by little as Lady Jocelyn asked for first one thing, then the other, always with that absent smile, sometimes a little reminiscent story that made their lord father shed tears when he was alive.

If Tygett hadn’t been reading the letters their eldest brother sent — “remember to mention the harvest feast when we were seven,” “bargain with him with words about how young he sent us away” and “use Gerion’s plight to your advantage,” — he would have thought that his elder sister was sly as a shadow to remember it all and to weaponize it with her best leverage: an uncanny resemblance to their late lady mother.

But instead, he had read the letters Jocelyn had sent their brother, and learned slowly that she was a different sort of brilliant, that from a writing desk in Casterly Rock, she’d directed a war effort halfway across the Seven Kingdoms in the Stepstones.

They had been fighting a war on two fronts, and as such, his eldest brother had entrusted him with the duty of seeing the war at home go well.

Now the war in the east has ended, and the war in Casterly Rock ought to as well.

* * *

Their lord had sent them all _away,_ all of them except for Lady Joss. Genna knows that. She knows that, but at the same time, something draws her back.

And there, there is her eldest brother leaning across the table, holding her sister’s face in the palms of his hands, worry like nothing else she has ever seen on his face.

“You cannot say no this time, Ty.”

She couldn’t see her sister’s face. All Genna could see was her straight back, golden hair swept up into piles and piles of pretty curls, red gown trailing on the floor.

“Not to the king.”

“What do you take me for?” Tywin’s eyes scan her face. “A man who goes back on his word?”

“He is a king. You cannot say no to him without starting a war, Ty.”

Genna watches as her eldest brother throws back his head and laughs, laughs long, laughs loud, laughs like he’s the mad one, not the king for wanting a second bride.

"Do not think I will not go to war for you.” Tywin throws his hands out wide, gestures as though there was an army behind him. “Make you a second bride? I will tear him from limb to limb, and I will make the whole world watch what happens when they corner a pair of lions.”

Genna suddenly turns away, wonders if King Aerys had written to Tywin about her instead, if he would rage and rage and rage and _laugh_ and speak of war as though it was nothing.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed it! :D


End file.
